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Where to Live in the 1920s?

After World War I, great shifts occurred in where Americans made
their homes. With increasing industrialization, many people moved from
rural areas into cities for employment opportunities, resulting in an
urban housing shortage. By 1930, 56% of Americans lived in urban areas,
whereas only 45% had been urban in 1910. Simultaneously, some residents
moved beyond the increasingly overcrowded cities because newly paved roads
and automobile ownership facilitated commutes to urban workplaces from
suburban residential areas. Both the urban and suburban migrations spawned
innovation by architects and city and regional planners.

In large cities such as New York, construction of apartment buildings
began to replace the huge townhouses inhabited by elite families in
previous generations. City architects had varying ideas about how to
position
these apartment buildings. Some wished to see them tightly packed
together; others thought they should be separated by large intervals of
open space
and parks. One New York designer went so far as to suggest that they
should be built on bridges in the waterways surrounding Manhattan.

Few architectural dreams were fully realized, as the apartments were
generally constructed to be most profitable instead of most visually
pleasing or socially beneficial, but the aesthetically pleasing ideas
influenced later urban construction and development.

With increased availability and use of the automobile for
home-to-work commutes, suburbs as we know them today started becoming
popular in the 1920s. Upper-middle-class suburbs at the time contained
few businesses and served only as residential areas. Residents depended
on their automobiles to take them to other locations for shopping and
services. Styles of houses within these suburbs varied, though generally
remained traditional, and the country club came to be the representative
suburban landmark during the Twenties. The magazine Architectural Forum dedicated entire issues to the
country club in 1925 and 1930.

Architectural historians have noted that smaller homes of the era
were strongly regional in their design, such as the ranch-style houses in
California. Though elements of homes and other buildings, such as windows
and doors, began to be mass-produced around the Twenties, most ventures
offering fully-manufactured houses did not meet with great success.

While many homes at the time were still built in traditional styles,
designers were working on their plans for the future. For example, after
collecting information and developing ideas, Norman Bel Geddes presented
his designs for the "future home" in a 1931 issue of Ladies' Home Journal.